• What is the geographic scope of the business?
• What differentiates the company from its competitors in the eyes of customers and other stakeholders?
• Which skills and capabilities should be developed within the firm?
• What are the important opportunities and risks for the organization?
• How can the firm grow, through both its base business and new business?
• How can the firm generate more value for investors?
The answers to these and many other strategic questions result in the organization's strategy and a series of specific short-term and long-term goals or objectives and related measures.
Implementation
The second major process of strategic management is implementation, which involves decisions regarding how the organization's resources (i.e., people, process and IT systems) will be aligned and mobilized towards the objectives. Implementation results in how the organization's resources are structured (such as by product or service or geography), leadership arrangements, communication, incentives, and monitoring mechanisms to track progress towards objectives, among others.
Running the day-to-day operations of the business is often referred to as "operations management" or specific terms for key departments or functions, such as "logistics management" or "marketing management," which take over once strategic management decisions are implemented.
Many definitions of strategy
In 1988, Henry Mintzberg described the many different definitions and perspectives on strategy reflected in both academic research and in practice. He examined the strategic process and concluded it was much more fluid and unpredictable than people had thought. Because of this, he could not point to one process that could be called strategic planning. Instead Mintzberg concludes that there are five types of strategies:
• Strategy as plan – a directed course of action to achieve an intended set of goals; similar to the strategic planning concept;
• Strategy as pattern – a consistent pattern of past behavior, with a strategy realized over time rather than planned orintended. Where the realized pattern was different from the intent, he referred to the strategy as emergent;